Currently viewing the tag: "Hope"
“Listen, Agnes.
I am working-class.
And that really does make a difference. I know what’s useful,
and what isn’t.
I know the price of things,
and I know how to give things up.
I know what it is to struggle -
these tough little lessons
I dont think you people ever learned.
I hold tight, and I do my work.
I make posters for good causes.
Even if they get torn up, I make them, even though we live in a country
where theory falls silent in the face of fact,
where progress can be reversed overnight,
where the enemy has stolen everything, our own words from us,
I hold tight, and not to my painting . . . not only to that.
Pick any era in history, Agnes.
What is really beautiful about that era?
The way the rich lived?
No.
The way the poor lived?
No.
The dreams of the Left
are always beautiful.
The imagining of better world
the damnation of the present one.
This faith,
this luminescent anger,
these alone
are worthy of being called human.
These are the Beautiful
that an age produces.
As an artist I am struck to the heart
by these dreams. These visions.
We progress. But at great cost.
How can anyone stand to live
without understanding that much?”
-Gotchling, a character in Tony Kushner’s play A Bright Room Called Day, set in Weimar Republic (Germany) in the 1930s as country falls to fascism. Tony Kushner is the author of Angels in America.
“If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves, we will evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!”
- James Connolly
“You are the final backstop, you are the final hope for humanity…. You are the final line of defense for unborn generations, for the children of all species. You were born for a reason.” - Van Jones, Power Shift 2009
“Hope is when you look out the window and you go, ‘It doesn’t look good at all, but I’m going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.’” – Anna Deavere Smith
“People who do not believe at all in a happy end impede changing the world almost as much as the sweet swindlers, the marriage-swindlers, the charlatans of apotheosis. Unconditional pessimism therefore promotes the business of reaction not much less than artificially conditioned optimism; the latter is nevertheless not so stupid that it does not believe in anything at all. It does not immortalize the trudging of the little life, does not give humanity the face of a chloroformed gravestone. It does not give the world the deathly sad background in front of which it is not worth doing anything at all. In contrast to pessimism which itself belongs to rottenness and may serve it, a tested optimism, when the scales fall from its eyes, does not deny the goal-belief in general; on the contrary, what matters now is to find the right one and to prove it. For this reason there is more possible pleasure in the idea of a converted Nazi than from all the cynics and nihilists. That is why the most dogged enemy of socialism is not only, as is understandable, great capital, but equally the load of indifference and hopelessness; otherwise great capital would stand alone.” – Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
“When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning!” – Eugene V. Debs, Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act
I figured I’d post another quote from someone who was once charged (and convicted) of sedition. Arundhati Roy and Eugene Debs are exactly that type of “good citizens” that governments like to repress.
Socialist Politics:
Recommended Readings
